We’re approaching the end of S7 of “Shetland”. It’s been a really well done series with Douglas Henshall as DI Perez. I hope the quality continues through the next two with a different actor up front.
Very atmospheric. Lovely islands.
I think it does continue to be high-quality, though I may have already mentioned I’ve thought Ashley Jensen (the new lead) was great since Extras and you still have Tosh.
Holy shit. 
Including Agatha Raisin!
Re The Expanse:
So have now reached end of season 3. Some things I had forgotten on that list of tropes:
It’s a VR technology, so they can have more Thomas Jane being tough PI. And it’s a weapon against an inhibitor/berserker style enemy (according to a remark from Holden).
What I remember about the last 3 seasons is that they are very uneven, and with a lot of unconnected plot threads that never really connects, unlike in the first 3 seasons.
Good:
Ashford and Drummer doing stuff together.
Amos back on earth.
Okay:
Bobby involved with black market back on Mars.
Amos has Clarissa in tow for some reason.
Bad:
Holden on a featureless planet battling Burn Gorman.
The stuff Ashford and Drummer do is chasing Naomis ex-husband, who is sort of a Diego on steroids.
Think I’ll have to take a break from the series for now.
The Expanse was definitely a bit patchy but a good watch overall. It completely ran out of steam in the last season though, some storylines (prime example being
Summary
that planet with the strange creatures
) going nowhere).
I never quite did ‘get’ that Amos/‘Peaches’ relationship; it seemed to come out of nowhere.
One thing my wife and I noticed in the later seasons. Early on, Tosh and Sandy were pretty much equals (and Sandy may have even had a wee bit more seniority than Tosh), but in the last couple of seasons it seems that now Sandy is just another Billy, stuck in the office looking through phone logs and CCTV footage.
Remember, the series ended with three books unadapted. Not the show’s fault that TPTB canceled it leaving major storylines cut off at their beginning.
I would imagine it’s because Tosh is personable, easier to look, at and a good foil for Perez. I can’t figure out what purpose the Rhona character serves, other than to walk into a room, frown, and then walk out again.
They pretty much covered the major events through to the end ofthe sixth book, Babylon’s Ashes. There’s a 28 year time jump kicking off the seventh, Persepolis Rising. It would be awesome if they rebooted the series in 2050 with the original cast (not that I’d be around to see it.) Or did it now with a brand new team.
Ok, as my previous post indicated, we are finished with Game of Thrones and, as far as I’m concerned, calling Bran and Sansa the likely winners at the start of S4… and then having them win the thrones (Iron/North)… is as great an entertainment call as I’m ever going to make.
Anyway, a lot to unpack here, but I don’t really want to start a GOT sidebar, but I do have some questions/thoughts…
- Things can get hazy, but is this, technically, a post-apocalyptic story? As in, from what I gathered, there were the Valerians who ruled all… and then they collapsed (a long time ago, show-wise) and civilization broke up into all these warring factions?
- Arya is my favorite character, by far.
- What happened to Stannis’s daughter was some of the hardest TV I ever watched. There were some times when I was like “they’re not going to go there… OMG, THEY WENT THERE!”, and this was #1 with a bullet.
- Zombies? Really?
- Might re-watch episode one again. Knowing the characters/back story now, it would probably be far more interesting than my first viewing.
- I liked how Tyrion discovered the secret of teleportation, that was cool. And apparently Jon Snow received communications from his army while onboard a ship a thousand miles away, which is also awesome. And didn’t the Ice Dragon destroy the Wall at Castle Black? How was it rebuilt in the last episode?
- Because of the above, I coined a new standard of measurement. Inna asked once how that guy was able to run back to the wall in just a few hours after spending weeks walking away from it, and I said that characters in Games of Thrones move at the Speed of Plight, which is variable, depending on the urgency of the problem and the needs of the plot. Sometimes it’s light speed, other times they miss being useful by that much.
The Speed of Plight, y’all!
The books probably explain it better, but you can still see it in the show.
Basically, Amos is a sociopath, because of his early life experiences. But he knows this about himself, and he doesn’t much like it.
He’s figured out that there are three groups of people in world: Those who need to be killed, those who need to be protected, and people like Amos, who often fall into the “need to be killed” group, but not always. When he first met her, he thought Peaches was one of the people who needed to be killed, but as he got to know her, he decided that wasn’t right, and that she was more likely a person who needed to be protected, with some hints of also being a bit like Amos.
Amos strives to be a good person, by using his sociopathic tendencies to protect those who need protection, but because he doesn’t think like a normal person, he sometimes gets that wrong.
Wish I could convince my wife to watch it. It’s great story-telling, even if you don’t like the idea of dragons, etc. And it basically stars every working British actor on the planet, most of whom nail their characters. It’s really a tour de force.
Not only that, but I think each book was probably more akin to a 20+ episode season instead of the highly compressed ones we got. I enjoyed the series having already read the novels but recognized the story incongruity that was introduced by having to smoosh it all down. The first season did ok, but subsequent ones had to ignore the fact that they forgot to address whole areas of the novels, and a lot of characters were not fleshed out like they should have been.
Also, this was a series that really really needed some narration. But people hate that, so it didn’t have it.
Not to mention the problem with theoretical future episodes caused by killing off a main character from the novels because the actor that played him on TV was a jerk.
I’ve noticed that too and that actor has had some other series action so I often wonder if he just negotiated his contract to spend less time on that show. However, in that case, I don’t know why they keep him around at all because his character no longer has any arc or drama.
Every procedural needs someone to set an unrealistic time limit on solving a complicated murder. If they don’t tie everything together in two weeks their jobs are on the line! Don’t you understand, the Commissioner is breathing down their neck that they aren’t performing miracles and bending the laws of physics!!!
Amen, brother, preach! And not just TV, book police procedurals too! A hateful boss and a short timeline, that’s what makes great detectives do their thing. Apparently.
Of course! A pox on me for a dozy pillock!